Schedules of ride shares were created. Organizers asked cab drivers to charge Black residents the same fare as the bus, which was ten cents. Cab drivers agreed.
Montgomery city officials couldn’t just let people exit the system of white supremacy and create a new societal structure. So they passed an ordinance saying that cab drivers had to charge no less than forty-five cents, and any driver who didn’t comply would be fined.[10] The MIA held meetings with city leaders, and the city refused their demands. So the boycott continued. Because 70 percent of the city’s bus riders were Black, the city urgently doubled fares to make up for the lost revenue.[11]
People participating in ride-sharing were constantly harassed and ticketed in an attempt to dissuade them from continuing. Black people with cars, like Martin Luther King, were arrested, and some were jailed based on the assumption that they were all involved in the boycott and that it violated city rules.
But the boycott was just getting started, and at the end of January 1956, Martin Luther King Jr.’s home was firebombed. He wasn’t home, and fortunately, the rest of his family wasn’t injured.[12]
Jo Ann Robinson’s car had acid poured all over it. Her front window shattered when a huge rock was thrown through it. Both of these acts of vandalism were carried out by police officers in uniform in broad daylight.[13] But still, she refused to quit.
As the calendar flipped to February 1956, attorney Fred Gray had been hard at work on a federal lawsuit contesting Montgomery’s policies of racial segregation on buses. He put together a group of women, all of whom had refused over the past year to abandon their bus seat for the sake of white deference. The plaintiffs were teenager Mary Louise Smith, elderly Susie McDonald, motherly Aurelia Browder, and the now sixteen and pregnant Claudette Colvin. One woman dropped out of the lawsuit because of death threats and the fact that her employer said she would be fired if she proceeded.
At a ball game, Claudette Colvin had met a man who she estimated to be at least ten years older than her. He took an interest in her, encouraged her passion for civil rights and societal change, and for once, made her feel like she wasn’t being stupid or difficult for caring about things like the Constitution.
And then this man took advantage of her. Claudette had no idea what was going on, because she had received absolutely no education on the topic, at home or in school. So when she wound up pregnant, she wasn’t even sure what had made it happen. This man, whom Claudette has always refused to name, was married, so there was no hope of him marrying her to care for their child.
Claudette’s actual boyfriend, wanting to do the right thing, came over to her house to propose. She desperately wanted to say yes, to make this problem disappear, but in the end, she chickened out.
Pregnant girls were kicked out of Booker T. Washington High, so Claudette decided to hide her pregnancy as long as possible, then go back to Birmingham to stay with her biological mother for a while to give birth. But Claudette was a small girl and couldn’t hide her pregnancy for long. A teacher soon figured it out and told the principal, who called Claudette, a good student, down to the office for expulsion.
She tried staying with her biological mom for a few weeks but ultimately moved back to Montgomery, figuring she could just get her GED someday. Her adoptive mother told her, “If God is for you, the devil can’t do you any harm,” and Claudette clung to that promise.[14]
When her baby, Raymond, was born in March 1956, he came out with blond hair and blue eyes. Now Claudette had yet another reason to be a pariah: people assumed her baby’s father was a white man.
As the federal lawsuit Fred Gray filed propelled forward, Claudette laid awake at night staring at Raymond sleeping in his bassinet. She had never abandoned the idea that she was meant for more and that the time to act was now.
The morning of the trial, she pumped her milk so she wouldn’t leak through her dress in the courtroom. Her mom had to work that day, as she was the sole breadwinner, but before she left, she prayed for Claudette. “Courage,” she whispered, squeezing her daughter’s hand.[15]
Baby Raymond stayed with a family friend while Claudette sat in the courtroom listening to the testimony of the other women who had refused to give up their seats on the bus. Fred Gray had saved her as the last witness. Her story of arrest and conviction was the most dramatic, and Claudette was the most determined.
As she recounted how she had been kicked and objectified by the police, the sound of muffled sniffs and the labored breathing of crying filled the courtroom. On cross-examination, the city’s attorney tried to trap Claudette into saying that she had been swindled by the silver-tongued Martin Luther King, who put her up to all of this. But Claudette was too smart for him.
“Why did you stop riding the buses?” the attorney asked, hoping she would talk about how the Montgomery Improvement Association had told them to.
She stared him in the eye and confidently said, “Because we were treated wrong, dirty, and nasty.”[16]
The city tried to argue that segregation was necessary to maintain law and order. Without it, there would be violence, they said.
One of the three judges on the federal panel asked the city attorney, “Can you command one man to surrender his constitutional rights to prevent another man from committing a crime?”[17] The attorney had no way to answer that.
Meanwhile, the bus boycott continued. Take a moment to think about how willing you would be to commit to doing something that was a significant inconvenience to you for many months. Most people fail at New Year’s resolutions within a couple of weeks. The Montgomery bus boycott was a massive push against the forces of resistance that wanted, more than anything else, for things to stay the same. It required the daily choice by tens of thousands of people to take part in something bigger than themselves for a cause greater than themselves.
The three-judge panel came back: segregation on Montgomery buses was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. One of the judges later said, “The boycott case was a simple case of legal and human rights being denied.”[18]
Claudette heard about the outcome in the news. No one from the legal team or any of the civil rights activists called her. No one offered her any help with the baby. No one brought her a baby gift or threw her a shower. She felt like she had been used for her compelling story. She was forced to get a job, but found it difficult to hold a restaurant position down because people kept recognizing her and it spooked her employers.
Not surprisingly, old Tacky Gayle didn’t like the outcome of the case and ordered the city to keep fighting. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, the Warren court, who agreed to hear it, and in November 1956 the Supreme Court released their opinion in Browder v. Gayle. They said that segregation on Montgomery buses was unconstitutional. The headline of the Alabama Journal read, bus segregation is knocked out.[19]
On December 20, 1956, the bus boycott officially ended. After nearly thirteen months of refusing to ride the bus, Black riders returned. After their prolonged, significant, and collective effort, along with a concerted desire to create change, the small and mighty ordinary Americans had done it.
Except: snipers began firing on integrated buses. Right after Christmas, a woman who was eight months pregnant was shot in both of her legs. Violence broke out around the city, and the bus system was shut down for several weeks. Four churches and the homes of two ministers were firebombed. All of them had openly supported the integration of buses. Reverend Ralph Abernathy, whose church and home were both firebombed, announced: “Despite the wreckage and the broken windows, we will gather as usual at our church, and offer special prayers for those who would desecrate the house of God.”[20]
Two white KKK members were indicted for the bombings. They confessed. And color me unsurprised: the all-white jury acquitted them anyway.[21] The boycott was over, but the civil rights movement was just getting started.
Years later, in the 1980s, The Washington Post tracked down bus driver James Blake and went to his house. He said he was just doing his job when he called the police in 1955 and had Rosa arrested, but my hope for a redemption story went out the window when he began to use the N-word to the Post reporter.[22]
Earl Warren was “conscience stricken” about what he had participated in when he ordered people like Norman Mineta’s family to leave their homes and move to incarceration camps.[23] So he spent the rest of his career trying to ensure all citizens were equal in the eyes of the law. He tried to do what was just, despite his past mistakes.
Septima Clark, who in 1975 had a gray, chin-length bob and cat-eye glasses, who once had not even been permitted to work in a Charleston classroom, was elected to the Charleston School Board. When the district created a new curriculum for civics, she noticed the books contained exactly zero Black children, so she protested. “I wanted to know who the Black children would have to look up to in that book. There was nothing in there that would help Black children to feel that they had a right to the tree of life, and I know how important that is.”[24]
She wrote, “To me, social justice is not a matter of money, but of will, not a problem for the economist as much a task for the patriot.”[25]
Septima Poinsette Clark retired to a home for the elderly on Johns Island, built by one of her former Citizenship School students, and passed away in 1987. “I never feel discouraged,” Septima said near the end of her life. “I know that each step is a stepping-stone in the right direction.”[26]
In 2019, the Highlander Research and Education Center, the facility that held all of Highlander’s records, burned down. Nearby were symbols of white nationalism.
That same year, Montgomery unveiled a new statue of Rosa Parks, along with markers for Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith—women who, along with Jo Ann Robinson, Recy Taylor, Septima Clark, and thousands of others, refused to stand up so the rest of us could rise.
Claudette Colvin, the brave fifteen-year-old who refused to give up her seat, asked to have her criminal record expunged. Her request was finally granted in December 2021. She said in an interview when the request went through that she wanted her grandkids to “know that their grandmother stood up for something. Against the injustice in America. The laws will change, and a lot of people, not only myself, paid the price and made sacrifices. We are not where we’re supposed to be, but don’t take the freedom that we do have for granted.”[27]
The civil rights movement would be nowhere without the courage of people with the least amount of political, social, and economic power. Those whose very lives breathed oxygen into justice and freedom, whose cumulative actions worked to unfasten the padlocks of centuries of oppression. None of them could do it all, but they all could do something.
These are the small and the mighty. And we can be too.
Conclusion
And here, my friend, is where our journey ends. For now, but not forever.
When I interview authors on my podcast, Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, I often ask them, “When the reader finishes the last page and closes the book, what is it that you hope they know?”
